One of the problems arising with the proliferation of Internet and email usage, as well as other means of electronic communication, is the receiving of unwanted and unsolicited bulk messages, commonly known as “spam”. While similar to the problems associated with physical junk mail, the consequences can be much more severe. Spam can contain viruses or other software that disable or damage the receiver's computer or other electronic equipment. In addition, the volume of spam may represent a significant load on the traffic handling mechanisms. For example, high volumes of email spam may negatively affect both client computer networks and the Internet itself. As a result, substantial efforts have been devoted to tracking and identifying spam in order to stop the problem at its source.
Currently, anti-spam services rely heavily on user feedback to refine the algorithms used to define and mark spam. This user feedback is important in two ways. First, new spam sources can be identified before they have a chance to proliferate. Second, and potentially more important for end-users, is the identification of false positives, or messages that have been falsely identified as spam by the algorithm.
Many anti-spam services mark the message header so that the user can readily identify the message as spam once the message is received by the user. The onus is then on the user to submit a misidentified message to a designated email address using their email client program. While this process is in common usage, it suffers from several limitations.
In the context of email spam, the reliance on the user's email client means that the instructions for submitting emails can be quite extensive and can vary substantially depending on which email client is used. As a result, the user can be discouraged from submitting emails due to the steps involved. This makes it difficult to improve the rate of false positives and refine the algorithms in the anti-spam service.
Related to this complexity, the user is required to remember the correct email address to submit information about false positive messages. Furthermore, the user is required to go through the process of forwarding the message through their email client. Even in a Graphic User Interface (GUI), this process still requires selecting the spam message, marking it for forwarding, entering the address and sending the forwarded message. This process can take some time, especially if multiple messages are identified and need to be forwarded.
The user's email client can also pose a problem. There are numerous email clients in use and they can vary significantly in functions and features. In particular, some clients do not support forwarding email messages in their original form as an attachment, rather they are sent after being reformatted, such as lines broken into a fixed number of characters per line, headers removed, etc. As a result, the message received by the anti-spam system may not be in its original form. This can create difficulties for the anti-spam system and staff in analyzing the email message forwarded by the user.
Additionally, the user may not want to forward the entire email message to the anti-spam system because of privacy concerns. The user typically cannot submit the signatures of the email, as he or she is not aware of the signatures of the email that mark the email message as spam.
Finally, the user's Internet Service Provider (ISP) may not allow the user to submit spam over its network. Some ISPs drop spam in their outgoing email and if the anti-spam system is not part of their network, the message will not be sent, preventing this existing method of submitting emails from functioning.
Another method of submitting email for spam analysis requires saving the email as a file and transferring the file to the anti-spam system manually or through a file transfer mechanism, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This process is even more demanding and time consuming for the user than forwarding the original message. Also, the email is transformed from one format to another as part of the process and the original content may be lost or damaged, potentially rendering it useless to the anti-spam system.
Therefore, there is a need for an anti-spam system that facilitates user submission of information and/or feedback regarding electronic messages marked as spam.